this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Left is a term that comes from France and is anti authoritarian in it's core so that's not very fitting for many of them!
There are many different binaries in play. The one you refer to is liberal (now anarchism) on one pole and authoritarianism on the other.
The modern European binary that many use (and frustratingly think represents "the world") divides along economic ideologies where capitalism would be the beginning of the right and more progressive ideologies on the left. Hexbear is far left by this definition.
What people need to understand is that the political spectrum is a lie, and all discussions based on the concept are inherently flawed, promoting reductionist thought if not outright falsehood.
It doesn't even matter how many axes you add, wanting to seize the means and genocide brown people or whatever doesn't make you a centrist anything and wanting to seize the means, punch Nazis, and jerk off to Papa Stalin's mustache doesn't make you more left than otherwise either.
You are kind of right in that the devision (at least in the traditional meaning from France) has two pillars, you have the authoritarian one siding with kings and nobels vs elected officials, freedome of speech and equality in a social (none economic) sense and you have the economic devision aka little state intervention to the market and redistribution vs the state as protective force for those who need it with stuff like strong worker rights and wealth redistribution. In short the traditional meaning of "left" is socially liberal but not market liberal which is a majore reason why I dislike the American attempt to split between left and liberal so much, if you are left you have liberal ideas and that's the part where Hexbear wants to frame me as somehow market/neo liberal wich is plain wrong!
That's because most of Hexbear is using the modern European binary which DOES split along economic lines. This is only a problem when someone asserts their binary is the universal one or fails to clarify which one they use.
I don't know if "modern european" is a good way to put it, I kind of think it's a result of the cold war, never made a lot of sense and was enforced by the arrival of neo liberal ideologies in european governments afterwards but that part is just a quick throught so don't quote me on it. You are definitely right that there are different definitions tho, one of them just also seems to reframe the word liberal which makes absolutely no sense to me. In the end they are all flawed and the biggest issue is that no matter which you use extreme ideologies like neo liberalism and backwards thinking aka the "modern" definition of conservative attempt to frame themself as the "middle" which is dangerous af and makes no sense ether so it's a rather pointless fight with a third party as winners! :/
It's from the early 1900s. Liberal hasn't changed. Conservatism is not the same thing in all societies ie a Chinese conservative and Iranian have very different outlooks on theocracy.